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Smile review

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Smile is an American horror movie, released in the Autumn of last year and debuting on physical media on Boxing Day in the UK.

It’s partly psychological horror, though is 18-rated and doesn’t scrimp on the gore in some scenes. It is – and I know this is a loaded word, but bear with me – derivative. The story takes the idea of a curse in a way that has been done to high standards before in films such as Ring, It Follows, Pulse, and Grudge. But as a deeply uncool but very talented rock star once said, ‘Every artist is a cannibal, every poet is a thief.’

The tagline says it all: ‘Once you see it, it’s too late.’ The protagonist is a psychiatrist who meets a patient who tells her she’s seeing things no one else can see: people smiling in an unpleasant, menacing rictus grin which foretells her painful death. Before long our heroine, Dr Rose Cotter (Sosie Bacon) is plagued by the same visions and locked in a race against time to save herself from a horrific death.

The trailer tells you all this and shows what Bacon is up against. It was a tricky one because on the one hand, the pedigree of these kinds of movies is excellent, but a glance at the list of them above shows that only one is American. Mainstream Western horror too often defaults to badly executed jump scares in a failed attempt to recreate the creeping dread of its foreign counterparts.

At the same time, this has been a good year for horror cinema and a new trend is developing, called out recently by Akela Cooper, screenwriter of the upcoming M3GAN, which looks like a ton of fun. Essentially, horror creatives are reacting against the ludicrous notion of ‘elevated horror’ by making films that celebrate everything that horror is great at – and has always been great at. Now is not the time to go into a diatribe about how horror has always been an elevated form, but as Cooper, who also wrote the barmy but fun Malignant, says, “We had a period of quote-unquote elevated horror, which was still good horror… For horror fans, it’s a smorgasbord, they have their pick of what they want to see. Variety is always nice.”

Smile really is a smorgasbord in that sense. A creepy curse story, with clear themes of trauma and people’s attitudes toward mental well-being. It’s here that the most interesting elements of the film lie. In an exchange on the Kermode and Mayo review podcast with a correspondent, Mark Kermode was adamant that this is a film about a curse, not about mental health. Still, Kermode is the man who remains certain that Jaws is about adultery…

The correspondent was concerned that the story was derogatory towards those suffering from mental ill health. Kermode recognised the concerns and was sympathetic, but argued that the film was explicitly about a curse.

The truth lies in the middle. Sure, there’s a curse, but the protagonist is a mental health professional, the police she speaks to about her late patient immediately dismiss the girl as crazy, and Bacon spends much of the film caught between her own horrific experience and the judgement of others. In short, the film can easily be seen as a commentary on the trials of those struggling with unseen, stigmatised illnesses. Unlike the person that wrote into Kermode and Mayo, I don’t think the film trivialises mental illness, I think it shows how difficult life can be for people in that position, as much because of society’s view of them as well as the illnesses themselves. God knows, our society is crazier than most individuals.

Having said that though, the film has brilliant practical effects which strengthen Kermode’s argument and it is, simply, a great horror movie. Fall still edges it for me, but Smile is a great example of the quality of horror cinema we’ve enjoyed in 2022. Recommended.

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